The Four Agreements: a Guide for Personal Liberation

5 months ago

“The four agreements, from Miguel Ruiz, is one of my bedside books because thanks to reading it I have been able to better understand certain behaviours, and this knowledge has helped me to gain much more confidence in myself.”

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“The four agreements, from Miguel Ruiz, is one of my bedside books because thanks to reading it I have been able to better understand certain behaviours, and this knowledge has helped me to gain much more confidence in myself.”

I do not want to gut the book; What I do want is that you really want to read it, and for that I will highlight the main points that this wonderful book is about.

Four commitments to mature

In summary, the four agreements that give name to this work are the following.

1. Be impeccable with your words

Throughout the lines of this work, the author explains to us the power that words really have: both those we say to others, those we receive and those which, in silence, we dedicate to ourselves.

Words have an impact on us. What we say we are is what makes us what we really are, and not the other way around. That is why we must be very careful with how we treat ourselves and with what we honestly think about ourselves.

“Say only what you want to say,” recommends Don Miguel Ruiz. Avoid saying things you do not think simply by fitting into a group, because it seems “normal”. Also, do not talk about talking, because as I explained before, words have a real impact on others and what for one can mean nothing, for another it can have a lot of value, both in a positive and in the opposite sense.

2. Do not take anything personally

This section of the book is revealing, because it tells us how what others say and think about us only defines them, because “what others say and do is a projection of their own reality”.

Remember if you have ever heard about what others thought of you. Perhaps you have felt bad, you have felt offended or offended … It hurts to be criticized, we are affected by the opinion others have about us, but we must be aware that what others think of us is not the reality of who we are, because their Opinions are distorted by their own reality, their perspective and their judgment.

Understanding this can be somewhat simple, but putting it into practice requires a lot of daily effort, and a lot of patience. Like any healthy habit we want to adopt, we must be patient and constant until we see results.
Maybe a day will come when the opinions of others do not matter to us, that day is when we will be really free, owners of ourselves and capable of being who we really are.

3. Do not make assumptions.

As the author says, “find the courage to ask and express what you really want.”
How many times have you drawn your own conclusions without even asking? How many times have you not understood well, and by not clarifying things have created misunderstandings? With how easy it is to ask to clarify an issue, we insist on drawing our own conclusions hastily and, in general, they tend to be disastrous.

Why when a friend stops calling us, we tend to think that we no longer care about him or that he has forgotten about us? What if you are suffering a lot of stress at work and have “forgotten” even your mother? If we ask, we get answers, and these are usually much closer to reality than our own conclusions.

“We tend to make assumptions about everything. The problem is that, in doing so, we believe that what we assume is true. We would swear it is real. We make assumptions about what others do or think. […] This is the reason why whenever we make assumptions, we look for problems.”

On the other hand, this section of the book also explains the importance of saying what we think, of not keeping our feelings, of not being afraid to express ourselves. How many relationships will not have come through the fear of rejection? Think even of the things you have stopped saying for fear of being laughed at, not knowing how to explain yourself well, or even embarrassment.

4. Always do your best.

The maximum that one can do will always depend on the circumstances, because one can not do the same one day when one rises with energy, that when one has the flu. Neither can we do the same thing at the end of the day when we are mentally exhausted we just got up; it depends even on our mood. But what Miguel Ruiz explains is that we always do the best we can, understanding our circumstances and adapting to them, but as much as we can in each case.

When you do your best you can avoid lamenting. Do you know that the important thing is to participate? Yes, that’s the important thing, but knowing that you did the best you could, that you gave everything that was in your power to give, because thanks to that you will avoid judging yourself and even mistreating you with phrases like “I am a failure “,” I should have tried harder “,” I’m lazy “…

And these are, in short, the four agreements that define this book. It is a book that in my opinion we should all read, because we learn a lot about human behavior and delve into the way that people learn.